CUSTOMER INTER@CTION SOLUTIONS — OCTOBER 2011

Busy contact center managers often overlook their customers' feelings. They tend to focus on easily quantifiable metrics such as abandonment rates, service levels, staffing levels, etc. While these metrics are important to the bottom line, there is also tremendous value in focusing on the consumer's experience. This is where behavioral science comes into the picture. Businesses can leverage psychology to improve customer service in contact centers...

Feature Articles

CRM, BPO, Teleservices

Forming Holistic Customer Interaction Solutions
Nearly two decades ago Vinton Cerf, who's considered a founding father of the Internet, drew headlines when he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the saying: IP on Everything. Apparently he did, er, that happened, as the Internet protocol has seeped into virtually every nook and cranny of communications. Now the same seems to be happening with cloud computing and social networking - and the contact center is no exception to the rule.

CRM for Small Fry
Due to the cost and the technical prowess required to employ them, customer relationship management solutions used to live solely in the domain of the large enterprise. Today, however, CRM is within reach of a much broader array of organizations as a result of new pricing models afforded by the introduction of software-as-a-service offers, and just the competitive nature of the customer relationship management space at large.

CALL CENTER TECHNOLOGY

Critical Considerations When Developing the Channel - Looking Beyond the Technology
For any enterprise, the success of their unified communications or contact center solution hinges on the insights and skills of their solution and service provider (aka integrator). The integrator is the critical link that brings together the customer's business, its goals, its infrastructure, with all of the various multi-vendor technology components that need to work together to meet those objectives. As a contact center technology vendor, we've found the sales and integration channel to be an extremely important extension of our business. From our years of experience in developing our channel, we've determined four critical considerations when evaluating an integrator that can be valuable to the end user too.

OPERATIONS AND MANAGEMENT

Sales Mobility: What Your Sales Reps and Customers Need
The sales industry is constantly on the go and let's face it, selling is not a some of the time thing. It's an all the time thing. Sales executives are expected to always be upselling existing customers and finding new customers. Selling is in your blood, and sales people know it is most effective when they are out on the road selling.

Awards and Recognition

CIS Congratulates TMC Labs Innovation Awards Winners
As more and more people adopt the Internet as a standard method of communication, organizations are seeing Web-generated leads double or even triple. Thatâ€™s good news. The problem arises when companies lack the capacity or strategy to effectively respond to increasing online lead intake.

Innovation Solutions: Knowlagent

Prioritize Off-Phone Work with a Call Center Agent To-Do List
Call center agents are the only people within an organization that function without an ongoing to-do list. Granted, agents need to complete specific tasks in order to close out a ticket or finish a case, but their primary responsibility is to field calls. Other activities - reading communications, training, project work - are scheduled and typically require additional headcount to ensure service levels are met.

Innovation Solutions: Soffront

Soffront Brings New Ease of Use, Flexibility to CRM
It does that by delivering a multi-faceted, easily customizable solution that can be used across an organization. The integrated CRM suite from Soffront spans and integrates the activities of sales, marketing, customer service and operations.

Empower Your Contact Center and Your Customers Through Multi-Channel Communications
At Digital Voice Systems, we partner with innovative organizations to deliver a solution that handles all communication channels, empowers both the customer and the agent, and management tools that improve the performance of any business. The unified application platforms from Interactive Intelligence and RightNow Technologies provide a cost-effective and easily managed multichannel system for consistent and responsive customer service, along with end to end reporting and quality monitoring. Our proven solution provides real answers to the problems faced by today's leading contact centers.

Columns

Publisher’s Outlook

What's New in Speech Technology
For example, Jeff Schlueter of Nexidia told me his company's speech analytics solutions have been in greater demand in this current economy as the desire to control costs has led to increased adoption of speech analytics. The company has released version 9.0 of its Enterprise Speech Intelligence product suite which cuts the TCO in half and allowing for customers to handle even larger amounts of data.

HIGH PRIORITY!

New Kids on the Contact Center BlockIt's time. Your existing communications technology is reaching end of life, the service costs are exorbitant, and you just don't have access to the kind of feature richness that can keep your business competitive. It's time to migrate your enterprise communications infrastructure to an IP environment.

Ask the Experts

Cloud-Based Communications: Trends, Benefits and Drivers
If functionality, flexibility and innovation are important keys to your business needs, then Communications as a Service (CaaS) is right for you. Learn about trends, benefits and drivers for cloud-based communications from Richard Snow, Vice President & Research Director for Ventana Research and Joe Staples, Chief Marketing Officer for Interactive Intelligence.

Logout

Logout
Bring It on HomeHello CIS readers. I suppose the first order of business for this issueâ€™s Logout column should be an introduction. As you may have noticed, Iâ€™m a new face at Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. In fact, Iâ€™ll be heading up the editorial effort at CIS from here forward.

Ask the Expert

The Social Alphabet: What You Need to Know About Social Media as the Ultimate Communication ChannelThe possibility is mind-boggling. To a business, social networks can mean the potential access to millions of people who are constantly sharing and looking for information â€” or in more direct business terms, â€œfar-reaching connections to consumers, customers and potential customers in the global marketplace, in virtually every demographic, in near real-time.â€ Fundamentally, becoming social also gives businesses and their contact centers an opportunity to build their brands â€” as well as pipelines, customer relationships, and more favorable reputations for the products they sell and the services they provide. That makes social media the ultimate communication channel for most any business.